Why all the euphemisms when reporting on Hamas

Sent to the MetroWest Daily News January 31, 2025:

Dear Editor:

Why are euphemisms used all the time when reporting on the barbaric, evil Hamas terror group? And why are unsupported assertions by Hamas repeated as fact, while the facts provided by Israel are either ignored or discounted with qualifiers such as "according to an Israeli toll?"

On the last day of January, I read two relevant articles, "8 more hostages freed in at-times chaotic handover" and "US contractors to staff Gaza checkpoint."

In the first, "chaotic" hardly describe Hamas, which perversely is never referred to as a terror group but usually with the euphemism "militant," deliberately organized an angry mob consisting of uniformed terrorists and ordinary "civilians" to harass the young female hostages finally being released after being brutalized in Hamas' terror tunnels for 15 months.

Only near the end of the article was there a single, short paragraph referring to the many evil terrorists Israel is releasing in return, 110 terrorists including several mass murderers. The article refers to some of the prisoners as "women and children," as if they weren't also terrorists.

The second article, which of course never accurately described Hamas as a terrorist group, concludes by reporting on the barbaric Hamas slaughter perpetrated October 7, 2023 using the anodyne term "assault," while creating the impression the total of 1,200 people murdered by Hamas in that pogrom and the 250 kidnaped and taken hostage in Gaza may be exaggerated by qualifying the information with the disclaimer "according to an Israeli total," despite the fact that if anything the total might be higher. On the other hand, it ends with the inaccurate sentence "Almost 47,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting."

Nowhere is it mentioned that the figure is provided by Hamas, that various reliable studies, including a recent one by the prestigious Henry Jackson Society, have found numerous errors and padding showing the number killed in the fighting is significantly less, and that Hamas has greatly exaggerated the number of civilians killed. For example, the report includes the following:

"Serious errors have been discovered on the Ministry’s lists of fatalities. These errors include a 22-year-old registered as a four-year-old, a 31-year-old registered as a one-year-old and several men with male first names registered as female – artificially increasing the numbers of women and children reported killed. The lists also include people who died before the war and people who died from attacks by Hamas rather than the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

"They likely include around 5,000 natural deaths per year, including cancer patients who were listed by the Ministry for hospital treatment after they had already appeared on fatality lists. Hamas also claimed hundreds of fatalities from attacks which turned out to be misfired rocket launches by Gaza factions."

Nowhere is it mentioned that Israel has reliably estimated that among those killed have been at least 17,000 Hamas and other terrorists, making the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths roughly 1-1, or 1/9 of the norm recognized by the United Nations Security Council during a May 22, 2022 meeting.

Sincerely,

Alan Stein 

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